


Funeral Custom

by SylvanWitch



Category: Spartacus: Vengeance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:44:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag for 3:05, "Libertus."  When the room has emptied, Glaber allows himself a moment of weakness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funeral Custom

When the room has emptied of witnesses, Glaber allows himself a moment of weakness, trailing the back of his hand across Marcus’ bloodied cheek, the man’s skin cold as stone beneath his shaking touch.  He remembers the feel of that flesh beneath his lips as he wrung a shout of mirth from Marcus, remembers running his hands down Marcus’ flanks until he quivered and writhed.

 

“Please, Gaius,” he’d beg, eyes wet with laughter-tears.  “Please,” holding his sides, which Gaius assaulted with merciless, feather-light touches meant to tickle and provoke.  That flank is now pierced by a grievous wound still tacky with shed blood.

 

Glaber remembers that Marcus had always smelled of open sky and fruit trees, a sharp, clean scent that promised joy.  When they’d rut in the orchard, out of sight of his father’s villa, Gaius would bury his nose behind Marcus’ ear and take in great, gusting breaths.  Marcus would tighten his thighs and urge Gaius with hands on his ass, hips stuttering upward to match his lover’s rhythm.

 

Now, all Glaber can smell is blood and filth, the stench of the beloved body’s final betrayal as the life had fled from Marcus.

 

Without warning, his knees threaten to give way, and he leans heavily on the desk upon which his tribune is stretched.  He curses custom, which keeps him from stripping Marcus of his useless armor and washing his body clean, leaving him unstained but for the fatal wound that robbed him of his best years.  He does not wish to leave this task to uncaring slaves, does not want any other to see Marcus as he once had, his flat belly, strong thighs, the delicate arch of his feet. 

 

Swallowing back an expression to which he must not—cannot—give voice, Glaber closes his eyes against the sensation of that body stretched beneath him and shivering with need.  They’d only just been men and already blooded when they’d discovered their mutual desire, and Marcus had been fearful of what others would say, more fearful still of what it might mean for their friendship.

 

“Be still,” Gaius had said, stifling Marcus’ protest with an admonitory hand over his warm, wet mouth.  Then he’d replaced hand with lips and invited Marcus’ breath into his mouth.  Soon after, they’d held the sure evidence of one another’s pleasure, stroked each other with uncertain, eager hands, and eaten each other’s astonished curses from panting mouths as they’d come to completion at almost the same moment.

 

Those hands are still now, lax and unmoving, never again to give expression to unspoken words of the kind they could not share.  Neither of them had much spoken of love, only need, but Gaius had ever known where Marcus’ heart fixed.  With a painful twist, his own heart beats uneven in his chest, and Glaber gasps for breath, suddenly afraid that Marcus had never known how much that boy’s love had meant to this man.

 

The night they’d had their final tryst, the night before the first battle into which Glaber would lead a legion of men, Marcus had lingered over strategy until they’d had the tent to themselves.  It had been months since they’d had such opportunity, Glaber already married, Marcus serving under another.  They should never have indulged their desires again.

 

But Marcus needed only to glance up from beneath his lashes, distracted from a suggestion of troop movements by some involuntary sound on Glaber’s own part, and that was all it took to undo every promise he’d made himself that he would never lay hands again on his brother.

 

There’d been nothing graceful in the coupling, not with guards stationed just beyond the thin canvas and with the horns any moment to call them to battle.

They’d scarce removed what few encumbrances they must to join when Marcus was opening himself for Gaius, saying, “Please,” in that way he had of making it sound like both a favor and an order.  And Gaius, for his part undone by the naked need on Marcus’ face, had sunk his cock to the hilt in that offered refuge, taking the forbidden gift with a fierceness made more violent by their need for mutual silence.

 

Breath still broken by the urgency of their efforts, they’d exchanged then, for the first and final time, the kind of promises that are never safely made, understanding even as they’d kissed and tenderly parted that their words carried no weight in the world through which they moved.

 

Still now, utterly still, robbed forever of breath, Marcus lies beneath Glaber’s unsteady touch and does not rise to meet it, nor yet will he ever say Gaius’ name in that hush of wonder.  Long though it had been since he and Glaber had been lovers, Gaius cannot shake the sense that something has been left unfinished between them.

 

Leaning over his tribune’s body, Glaber presses his lips to the cold shell of Marcus’ ear and breathes into it another impossible promise, hoping that it will reach Marcus on the shores of the afterlife, giving him reason to pause there awhile and wait for Gaius so that free of life’s constraining custom, they can be together once more and forever.

 


End file.
